Artist j.frede composes flea market photographs into custom-built frames, creating visual and narrative landscapes from the previously unassociated materials. The works spread across the wall, building on each other through similar landscapes or horizon lines. The project, titled Fiction Landscapes, builds on the artist’s interest in memory, tapping into others’ momentos of the past to create fictionalized scenes of ambiguous origin.

Although each image has once been a placeholder in time for the photographer, once it gets collected into a mixed-up bin at a flea market these associations are erased. “Arranging these into new landscapes that have never existed speaks to the stitching together of human behavior and how we relate to time and the past,” says Frede. “How many people have pulled over at that rest stop and taken nearly the same photo of the plain hillside? All locking their own associations into the view, a first road trip with a new love; last road trip to see grandma; one of many road trips alone.”

The Los Angeles-based artist strictly uses anonymous photographs from the past for his works, never incorporating photographs of his own or individuals he knows. The memories he personally imbues into each composition in the series are instead ones he creates while making each arrangement, placing his own marker within the newly composed environment.

Currently, j.frede has a piece from Fiction Landscapes in Three Day Weekend: Party in the Back at Blum & Poe on view through December 19, 2015.